A Rant About Games Lists

Don't bother reading this if you want anything informative. It's a rant.

It's been a while since I had the lists on the blog, and they will return one day. Not least because I'm fed up of seeing list after list after list of ~7-20 open source games pop up in cheap attempts to get web traffic.

Often the lists just comb over the same popular games that most people should know about already and are much listed all over the net, but they still get dugg or fsdaily'ed or whatever-the-latest-craze-site-is'ed. The standards are often too low on these sites (in general). I'm sure people just click '+' without really reading.

What's worse is that these lists are usually poorly researched, such as this one (don't click unless you want proof - link). Very little info is given on each game, just youtube vids of the games most people are likely to already know about. The author states all the games in the list are open source, then puts America's Army in at #3 (AA was not open source last time I looked). And linking Tux Racer despite it being long ago abandoned? Why not do the world a favour and bother looking this up? I mean this information is not hard to come by - the Wikipedia entry covers the current Tux Racer king which is Extreme Tux Racer, and the ETR site is the 4th bloody result on Google for 'tux racer'. So all these people do is probably hurt ETR by directing traffic away from it to an old dead game. Meh.

Every "hey look at me I know 5 games" list I see has some kind of annoying issue like the above. It's disinformation, it's cheap crap, and it bothers me (probably more than most since I put a lot of time into getting correct information out there).

Maybe I'm just being a bit overly touchy about the issue, after all, the noise gets traffic to go to [mainly] open source games and that's a Good Thing (tm). However, the best thing people can do is raise awareness of the proper places to find such information. Next time you see a crap list, redirect them to LibreGameWiki or Qubodup's list or this list on the Ubuntu forums or perhaps even here.

I feel better now. Thanks for reading (or not).